5 Common Reasons Your PPC Campaigns Fail

Pay Per Click commonly referred as PPC is not an easy task to do especially if you are a new kid on the block. However, when done rightly your PPC campaigns can generate targeted leads, increase your conversion rates, and ultimately boost your business. But, the bad news is that a great no. of PPC campaigns fail.

If you are also witnessing failure in your PPC campaigns, then don’t despair as you can put your campaign back on the track by not committing some common mistakes.

Here are 5 reasons you need to know for the success of your PPC campaigns.

1. Too much focus on CPL (Cost per lead)

Cost Per Lead = Cost of generating new leads. With the cost per lead metric, you can analyze how effective your PPC campaign is in terms of generating new leads. The main purpose of this metric is to provide your marketing team with a tangible figure so they clearly know how much money is being spent on acquiring new leads. However, based on CPL if you are deciding whether your PPC ads are working or not then you are mistaken.

As per the PPC best practices, you need to focus on optimizing your ads for conversions instead of optimizing your ads for clicks. Undoubtedly, CPL is a good way to evaluate the performance of your PPC campaign but it does not actually guarantee you any results.

PPC campaigns are not only about clicks rather what matters is how many leads become paying customers. No wonder many PPC campaigns with significant CPL fails because the success of a PPC campaign can only be measured by profit generated.

As a marketer, for the success of your PPC campaign, you need to consider ROI focused metrics.

2. No Landing Page or Poorly Designed Landing Page

A landing page is critical to the success of your PPC campaign. Not having a dedicated landing page or having a poorly designed landing page is a common reason behind the failure of a PPC campaign. Let’s take a dig at this point.

# An absence of a dedicated landing page:-

So many PPC campaigns fail as they redirect users to a home page instead of a dedicated landing page. Through your ads, if you are sending visitors to a homepage where they need to hunt for the information they are looking then get ready to see the increased bounce rate on your website.

To boost your conversions, take your visitors to a landing page that gives information about the particular product or service in the most convenient way without any need for searching around.

# Poorly Designed Landing Page:-

A potential buyer on an average spends around 15 seconds on a web page. Now you know, that you have only 15 seconds to turn your leads into sales. For this, you need a well-designed landing page that demonstrates the value of your product or service in a clear & concise manner.

Giving too many options to your visitors on your landing page can sidetrack them or confuse them. So ideally, it is suggested to limit the landing page action to one or two and logically place your CTA buttons for maximum conversions.

Image Source: unbounce

For instance– Here is an example of a poorly designed landing page for a PPC campaign. Unfortunately, The landing page of JustFab is not so fab (pardon the pun).

A Landing page is all about tempting the visitor to accomplish a goal. But in the JustFab’s landing page, there are so many distractions and offers such as buy 2 pairs for $ 39.95 and another offer buys one and gets one free can easily confuse the prospect.

There is so much happening on the page that CTA button is getting lost in the clutter. Again, CTA button needs to be of contrast color so that it stands out instead the use of the same color as some other elements on the page is interfering with the effectiveness of the CTA button. To lure customers into clicking on the button, you can also use some exciting CTAs like BUY NOW, SIGN UP FOR FREE

3. Bad ad Copy

All your efforts go in vain if your PPC ad copy is not compelling enough to grab your prospects attention. The challenge here is, you get limited 25 characters only to present your offer or product in a way that it appeals to the searcher’s intent.

From research to playing with words, your ad copy needs to have a catchy headline and effective content that conveys the usefulness of your product or services for your prospects. Remember, that you only get a split second to catch the attention of your prospective buyers.

An effective ad copy answers 3 questions:

Firstly, what you are offering?

Secondly, how it is helpful for the users?

Thirdly, what you want users to do? (It should clearly define the next action for prospects that makes them click on your search ad.)

For instance- Here is an example of an effective ad copy. If someone is searching ‘help get rid of acne’ then the title ‘Dealing with acne’? Best matches with the searcher’s intent and entice him/her to click on the ad copy.

Similarly, if someone is searching tshirt design then the title ‘looking for latest T. Shirt designs perfectly matches with the buyer’s intent. The closer your title is to the buyer intent better are the chances of success.

Image Source: Neil Patel

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4. No proper conversion tracking

Through conversion tracking, you can keep a track of clicks that finally resulted in a conversion. Conversions are measured by putting tracking codes on your website to get an insight into conversion actions of prospects. Most widely used conversion actions are:

So, while creating your ad copy you need to keep buyer’s intent in mind and present your offer in the best possible way to match that intent.

The absence of conversion tracking is no less than flying blind. To know whether you have achieved your goal or not, proper conversion tracking is essential. Conversion tracking is core to the success of your PPC campaign as it enables you to analyze whether the clicks on your ad were of any significance or not. Without proper conversion tracking, you have visibility only till the click level knowing how many clicks you have got and how much it cost.

It is has been observed the inability to tie revenue back to conversion action or significant user action is one of the biggest reason of PPC campaign failure.

5. Limited Budget

This is one of the most common reasons for the failure of PPC campaigns. Many companies have great PPC campaigns with a killer ad copy, keywords, and landing page but they still fail because of their limited budget. Many advertisers become conservative when it comes to spending on their PPC campaign and then they get little to no results.

If you are just getting started with your PPC campaign for the first time then to get results, you need to increase your initial spending, to test your search marketing strategy. Testing is essential to get a better sense of your best keywords, landing pages, and ad copy.

Thus, you need to bid high to know the full potential of your ads. With a high bid, your ads will be displayed in a higher ad position and you will be able to maintain quality score and hence generate more clicks to your ads.

By increasing spending budget we do not mean that you need to spend your entire marketing budget on a single PPC campaign. However, to figure out the most profitable search ads, you need enough funds and gradually you can head towards ROI focused route.

Wrapping up

If you are losing faith in PPC advertising, just take the above-mentioned reasons into account when planning your next PPC campaign. Once you beat the failure reasons, your PPC campaigns will certainly become successful. Good luck!

Campbell Jof is a Creative Head for Designhill.com, as well as a blogger and designer. He writes on topics concerning design, eCommerce, start-ups, digital marketing, and interactive content. His creative work has earned him several laurels over the years.